Lost Contact

Fishermen bring in a body that has been in the water long enough to make identification a guess. The shotgun wounds say murder, and the face says very little. Two women step forward with claims on the dead man. Edwina Coryn believes it could be her husband, missing for a month. Fiona Jay is just as sure it could be hers, a husband with mental health problems who has also disappeared. But Wycliffe has two widows in waiting and one corpse, and no good way to choose between them.

Both women are in financial trouble because their husbands vanished, which gives each of them a reason to want the body to be the right one. Both also swear they have no idea what happened to their men. That mutual denial is the engine of the whole episode. Wycliffe is left with one honest question: which of them is lying, and how much of the truth is sitting at the bottom of the sea?

Eleanor Bron is Edwina Coryn and Marian McLoughlin is Fiona Jay, two performances that circle each other for the whole hour. Martin Hancock is Dave, Bruce Barnden is Harry, and Tim Wylton returns as Franks. Jack Shepherd anchors it as Wycliffe, with Helen Masters's Lane and Jimmy Yuill's Kersey at the station. Maureen Wilmot and Armorel Chamberlain appear as the first and second women.

W.J. Burley and Isabelle Grey wrote it, Patrick Lau directed, and it aired in July 1995.

Lost Contact is a sharp little exercise in reading people under pressure. It draws the line between suspicion and outright deception, and it lets the line wobble for as long as it can. Genuine distress looks almost the same as performance here, which is the point. There is a smallness to the setup that suits Wycliffe perfectly: one body, two claimants, and a community full of people who would rather not know. It is the kind of episode that reminds you why the show worked without ever raising its voice.